At Parolla, we are always looking for ways to improve how we deliver our payroll services. That means reviewing not only performance, reliability and security, but also where the technology supporting our platform is operated.
We have now completed the migration of our remaining supporting services back into the European Union.
It is important to be clear: Parolla customer data and payroll processing have always been hosted and carried out within the EU. This project related to supporting services such as content delivery, web application protection, analytics and session-recording tools.
The migration gives us greater control over our infrastructure, reduces reliance on non-EU service providers and strengthens our approach to data sovereignty.
Why data sovereignty matters with all Parolla services in the EU
The technology landscape is changing.
Organisations are paying closer attention to where their information is stored, where it is processed and which service providers may have access to it. GDPR does not automatically require every service provider to be based in the EU, but international data transfers can introduce additional contractual, legal and operational considerations.
For a payroll platform, these considerations are especially important. Payroll systems process confidential employee, financial and employment information, and customers reasonably expect strong controls around how that information is managed.
Our objective was therefore straightforward: move the remaining supporting services into an EU-controlled environment while maintaining—or improving—the performance and reliability of the Parolla platform.
Moving from Inspectlet to self-hosted OpenReplay
Inspectlet has been a useful tool for understanding how customers interact with a website.
It provides functionality such as:
- Session recording
- Heatmaps
- User journey analysis
- Interface troubleshooting
- Customer-support diagnostics
These capabilities can be valuable when investigating usability issues or helping a customer who is experiencing difficulty with a particular process.
However, Inspectlet is a US-based service. Because session information could be transferred outside the EU, we operated it as an opt-in feature. This limited how broadly we could use the tool and how long we could retain useful diagnostic information.
We have now replaced Inspectlet with OpenReplay.
OpenReplay provides a strong feature set for session replay, frontend monitoring and technical diagnostics. Most importantly, it can be self-hosted within our own EU infrastructure.
This gives Parolla greater control over:
- Where session information is stored
- How long information is retained
- Who can access recordings
- How the service is secured
- How diagnostic information is deleted
- How the platform integrates with our wider security controls
Self-hosting also allows us to use session-replay information more effectively when supporting customers, while applying our own retention rules and access controls.
Replacing Cloudflare with Bunny.net
Cloudflare provided Parolla with reliable DNS, proxy, content-delivery and web application firewall services.
Its global network and integrated security features made it a strong technical solution. However, as part of our wider review of data sovereignty and supporting-service providers, we decided to move these services to an EU-based alternative.
We selected Bunny.net, a Slovenian company providing content delivery, DNS and network services.
Bunny.net gives us an EU-based platform for important parts of our public-facing infrastructure, including content delivery and DNS management.
The move was not simply a matter of changing providers. Cloudflare includes a substantial range of built-in web application firewall and proxy functionality. Moving away from it meant that Parolla had to take greater direct responsibility for several security and network controls.
This included reviewing and strengthening:
- Reverse-proxy configuration
- Web application firewall rules
- Rate limiting
- Geographic access controls
- Firewall policies
- Traffic filtering
- Origin-server protection
- Logging and security monitoring
- High-availability arrangements
Taking greater control requires more internal management, but it also gives us clearer visibility over how traffic reaches the Parolla platform and how threats are detected and blocked.
Infrastructure distributed across Hetzner data centres
Parolla’s core infrastructure is hosted with Hetzner in the EU.
Our systems are distributed across diverse data-centre locations and separated according to their function. This includes application, database, storage, monitoring and network services.
The architecture is designed to reduce reliance on a single server or system component. It supports redundancy, service continuity and controlled recovery in the event of a failure.
As part of this project, we reviewed the placement of supporting services and ensured that they operate within our wider EU-hosted infrastructure model.
What this means for Parolla customers
For customers, there is no change to how they use Parolla.
The migration has taken place behind the scenes and forms part of our ongoing programme of infrastructure, security and data-protection improvements.
The principal benefits are:
- Parolla data and payroll processing remain within the EU
- Supporting services are now operated within the EU
- Session replay is self-hosted and under Parolla’s control
- We have greater control over retention and access
- Our network and proxy security controls are more directly managed
- Infrastructure is distributed across diverse EU data-centre locations
- Reliance on non-EU supporting-service providers has been reduced
Greater control over our technology
Moving services is rarely as simple as replacing one supplier with another.
In this case, the migration involved rebuilding network controls, changing DNS and proxy arrangements, deploying self-hosted analytics infrastructure and ensuring that monitoring, security and resilience remained effective throughout the transition.
It was a significant technical project, but an important one.
Parolla customer data and payroll processing have always remained within the EU. We have now extended that approach across the supporting services used to deliver, protect and improve the platform.
This gives us greater control over our systems and provides a stronger foundation for the future development of Parolla.
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